Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2016 August 14

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August 14

Japanese alphabets

Japanese has three alpherbets (hiragana, katakana, and kanji) suposidly because every word is a homophone with two or more different meanings, so without distingusihing them by using the different alpherbets nobody would know what was ment by the use of each word in a sentance and nobody would be able to understand each other.

So explain to me, how does radio work in Japan? How do Japanese people talk to each other in the street? How do Japanese people understand each other in any situation where the three alpherbets can't be used? 11:13, 14 August 2016 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by MagicalMaddocker (talk • contribs)

I think that like Chinese, Japanese is a tonal language (i.e. the pitch determines the meaning of the word). Foreigners speaking the language can make unfortunate mistakes because of this, but for the natives radio and ordinary conversation work just fine.

Tone (linguistics) tells us that Japanese is tonal in a rather more limited way, compared to Chinese. Less than half of Japanese words use tonality. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 11:56, 14 August 2016 (UTC)

I think you're mistaken about why Japanese uses three different sets of characters. Kanji is an adaptation of the Chinise writing system, and the other two are used for words that have no direct Chinese equivalent. See Japanese writing system for how the system developed. Rojomoke (talk) 12:09, 14 August 2016 (UTC)

A frequently asked question about Japanese writing is "if they can write everything with just kana, why do they still use kanji?" A frequently given answer is "homophones are usually written with different kanji characters; writing these words with kana would lead to ambiguity." --51.9.188.8 (talk) 12:22, 14 August 2016 (UTC)

Terminology remark: none of the Japanese character sets is an "alphabet". Kana are syllabaries, and kanji is logography.

That aside, English is as rich in homophones as any other language; see [1] for an example. In speech, this doesn't create any intelligibility problem, because the context for each word disambiguates its meaning. Same applies to Japanese. --51.9.188.8 (talk) 12:17, 14 August 2016 (UTC)

The first point is that a writing system is utterly extraneous to a language. Many languages have never been written; some have been written with several different scripts; any language can be written in any script (even the claim sometimes made that some scripts suit some languages better than others is pretty specious: many customary scripts are rather bad at representing their customary languages, eg English, Tibetan). When Japanese (or English, or Navajo) people talk to each other in the street, writing systems are not usually involved in any way.

Secondly, the three systems which make up the conventional Japanese writing system are not alphabets (as somebody said above) and are used writing distinct parts of the language.

Thirdly, though Japanese is a tonal language (in the same sense that Ancient Greek and Modern Serbian are tonal languages, but a very different sense from how Chinese and Thai are tonal languages), this has no necessary connection with its writing system. It happens that Thai orthography does represent its tones, but rather few languages consistently mark tones (in any sense) in their conventional orthography (though they may be marked in some way for scholarly or teaching purposes). Neither Chinese nor Japanese writing has any conventional way to represent tones. --ColinFine (talk) 15:05, 14 August 2016 (UTC)

And as for why the Japanese continue to use three systems: it almost entirely because of tradition. Arguments about homophones are no doubt sincerely offered, but they have little weight. The spoken language copes very well with all its homophones, so there is no reason to think that writing could not do so. A thousand years ago, Lady MurakamiMurasaki wrote Genji Monogatari entirely in kana. Roy Andrew Miller argues somewhere that the complexity which strikes us as a disadvantage would have been seen as an advantage by the bored Japanese aristocracy a few centuries ago. --ColinFine (talk) 16:22, 14 August 2016 (UTC)

"The spoken language copes very well with all its homophones, so there is no reason to think that [kana based, Kanji-less] writing could not do so." And it certainly does: indeed Japanese Braille makes no provision for kanji at all (its eight-dot extension for kanji is not, to my knowledge, in common use) and its users write Japanese exactly as it would be if it were written entirely in kana, yet, as far as I know, visual impairment is no more a handicap for dealing with the written language in Japan as it is elsewhere. Contact Basemetal here 21:04, 16 August 2016 (UTC)

Minor correction: I think you meant Murasaki, not "Murakami". {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 2.123.26.60 (talk) 12:28, 15 August 2016 (UTC)

True. Corrected, thank you. --ColinFine (talk) 19:38, 16 August 2016 (UTC)

Japanese does have a lot of homophones, due to borrowing so many Chinese words. Japanese phonology does not do justice to Chinese words, so words that sound different in Chinese may wind up being homophones in Japanese. However, Chinese words were borrowed along with the kanji to write them, so they have different kanji even if they sound the same. This makes the kanji system easier to understand than the spoken word.

There are basic rules on when to use the three script systems of Japanese writing: (1) use kanji for lexical elements (nouns, verb stems, adjective stems, etc.); (2) use hiragana for the grammatical elements, such as particles, conjugations, auxiliary verbs, and noun suffixes, and also for words that you don’t know a kanji for, and words that you want to soften (since kanji has a more formal feel, technical, and can be cold); (3) use katakana as though it were italics, for foreign words and for emphasis.

Because kanji solves the problems of homophones, especially in technical writing, when such subjects are spoken out loud, the Japanese speaker often relies on the tactic of "drawing" the kanji character in the palm of his hand with a finger of the other hand. Sometimes for emphasis, the speaker may hold up the hand where he "drew" the character for everyone to see (even though he did not really draw anything, so the hand is blank). On the radio, you have to speak in ways that clarify the homophones by context. —Stephen (talk) 09:47, 15 August 2016 (UTC)

@ColinFine: Written Japanese isn't just transcribed spoken Japanese. Writers take advantage of the ability to write concise kanji compounds that wouldn't necessarily be intelligible if spoken. Also, as Stephen said, native speakers draw kanji in the air to disambiguate homophones in spoken conversations. I suspect that spoken Japanese would have evolved to have fewer homophones if the written language didn't have kanji.

Certainly, Japanese could be written without kanji, just as English could be written without punctuation, letter case, paragraphs, and other features exclusive to the written language, but it would be a big change. It's not as simple as mechanically discarding the extra information.

Unrelatedly, it's not actually known whether The Tale of Genji was written in kana. Quoting myself from this thread: "As far as I know, even the earliest surviving editions use kanji. It's just speculation that the (now lost) original manuscript used only hiragana, and that's not because Murasaki didn't know kanji (she did, and was apparently something of a prodigy), but only because that was the convention for women at the time. (Sources: her Wikipedia article and this thread and the 'original' text with kanji.)" -- BenRG (talk) 23:36, 17 August 2016 (UTC)

I am a Chinese and I am a beginner of learning Japanese. As I know, it seem that there are not so many homophone. And Hiragana, katakana and kanji are not used to distingusihing homophone. Sometimes, there are two words sound the same/similar,such as 橋(bridge) and 箸(chopsticks) are both はし(hashi). Kanji here has the function of distinguishing the two words with similar pronunciation. Hiragana here is just like IPA to show the pronunciation. However, Katakana is always to spell the foreign words. For example, プレゼント(purezento) is a word from the English word "present", so it is write in Katakana. Sometimes, Katakana is used to underline, just like capital alhpabet. (Well, I am just a beginner and I am not really good at Japanese and English, if you don't know what am I saying, just ignore me. Orz...) --Dqwyy (Talk)^C _{from zhWP (頁|論|獻|會)} 15:37, 17 August 2016 (UTC)

It's even more complicated: around 1100 or 60% of kanji have two or more readings, that as well causes much problem for the learners of Japanese. Some details here (p. 24).--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 19:26, 19 August 2016 (UTC)

• This is a lesson in why everyone - and especially native speakers of English, as the questioner is, and I am - should learn another language. I took Italian in Junior High, and found out that you could communicate just fine without using pronouns, as the verb inflections indicated who was saying what about whom. At college I took Japanese, and found out that you could communicate just fine without using pronouns, with only two verb tenses, and with politeness levels rather more complex than the T–V distinction - that's now extinct in English, or course - that are part in everyday communication. OK, finished my rant. Keep calm and and - especially native speakers of English - learn another language.--Shirt58 (talk) 10:42, 19 August 2016 (UTC)

The number of homophones in Japanese is not that large. According to one study only 6% of a vocabulary list of 170,000 Japanese words are homophones. Comparing with English, where one study of a list of 70,000 English words gave around 2800 homophones or 4%, Japanese is not so excessive. However, it is unknown how many homophones are in the actual texts/speech, but even if there were 10% it would not make a big problem because of the context. The human brain works in recognizing the spoken language in a much more complicated way than it is usually thought. Not to mention that people actually speak not in single words but in chunks of fused words.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 18:49, 19 August 2016 (UTC)

Anybody with access to The Times

Can anybody with access to The Times please check if Shamash, Jack (March 6, 2004). "Yiddish once again speaks for itself". is the source for this paragraph in the Yiddish article? Debresser (talk) 21:16, 14 August 2016 (UTC)

Try WP:REX for requests of this type. It is a board specifically designed for exactly this kind of request, and I find the people who frequent there to be fast and friendly in their responses. --Jayron32 23:07, 14 August 2016 (UTC)

The two are not the same. The ID of the Wikipedia citation is 1038349. The ID of the article Debresser links to is 2097943. There are 14,000 Jewish families in Stamford Hill, so I am surprised that Jack Shamash would write that the language is under threat there. Here's a gem from The Times of 25 June 2016:

A scene of modern Britain played out on a rail replacement bus service in Newport yesterday. A woman wearing a niqab was chatting to her son in another language. After five minutes, a man suddenly snapped: 'If you're in the UK, you should speak English.' At this, another passenger turned round and explained: 'We're in Wales. And she's speaking Welsh.'

@Jayron32 Done. Thanks. Debresser (talk) 21:32, 15 August 2016 (UTC)

@Anonymous editor A population of 14,000 is definitely a threat of extinction for a language. Nice quote. Debresser (talk) 21:34, 15 August 2016 (UTC)

14,000 families does not equate to a population of 14,000, especially when it's a Chasidic community (average number of children seven per family). The number of Jewish children in registered secondary education is 800 girls and 400 boys, suggesting a lot of the boys are enrolled in illegal unregistered yeshivas. Assuming a total of 1 600 children this suggests a population of 20,000 minimum. Estimates are way above that - see Stamford Hill. In the whole of London (Stamford Hill is by far the largest community) there are about 1/4 million Jews. 86.150.12.166 (talk) 11:22, 16 August 2016 (UTC)

My thanks to Debresser for pointing to this interesting insight into the Stamford Hill Chasidic community. Passages in the Wikipedia article are taken word for word from the Times piece. The "intercalated" passage between the two passages used says

The community is at present doubling in size every ten years. There are currently around 24,000 strictly Orthodox Jews in Stamford Hill, of these more than 12,000 are under 16.

House prices in Hackney have gone up faster than anywhere else in the country - 900% since the turn of the century, which was when 10% of all the street lights fixed nationally were in Hackney, police surrounded the town hall during the budget meeting and the local M P warned of "a wild west of planning" and "rats running through the streets".

In No pop music, no TV: life for girls at an Orthodox Jewish school - When she became their English teacher, Eve Harris was shocked by the censorship she had to impose on her Charedi pupils, The Times, 7 October 2013 Eve Harris says:

According to the Institute of Jewish Policy Research, there are currently 53,400 Charedi Jews in Britain, a group that is growing fast. Membership of Charedi synagogues has doubled since 1990, and they now account for three out of every four British births.

Eve notes that "not one of my pupils had heard of Madonna, Rihanna or Beyoncé." 81.151.129.213 (talk) 15:37, 20 August 2016 (UTC)